Wedding Dress for Success
By Wendi Winters
The engagement ring is on your finger. You’ve set a wedding date, found an officiant, and scored a fabulous venue. Now, what on earth are you going to wear? It’s time to start shopping for your wedding dress.
The process is one to be cherished, and it harkens back to a long-ago era, before the time of sewing machines and mass production. Certainly a bride in a hurry can buy a perfectly wonderful wedding dress off the rack. But you can also indulge in purchasing what may be the only garment in your life that is tailored expressly to your tastes, desires, budget, and body. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience (unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor, who married lavishly and often—eight times).
To buy a wedding dress with minimum hassle, you’ll need to start nine to 12 months before your wedding date. It will take time to construct the dress you order and ship it to the store where you purchased it. It will take more time for a fitting or two and to handle any alterations.
When you are ready to begin, sit in a quiet place and think about your wedding day and your personal fashion image. At your wedding you want to look like yourself, not an unrecognizable fantasy creature. If you are planning a wedding in a cathedral or an evening reception with an eight-course dinner in a lavish hotel ballroom, you probably want an elaborate gown to match. A midmorning wedding ceremony on the beach or in a daisy-strewn field begs for a much simpler dress. Both visions can and should be utterly magical.
Standing in front of a three-way mirror, take an honest look at yourself and your body. What do you want to accentuate? A beautiful bustline, a small waist, or great legs? Are your best features your shoulders and neckline? Is there a part of your body that you’d prefer to camouflage? Let the dress do the work for you.
Use Your Words!
Before you begin shopping, look over this list of terms that are often used to describe aspects of wedding dresses. This will give you the vocabulary you need to express your ideas and desires to dress specialists:
Now that you have a better idea of what’s available, clip out photos of wedding dresses that you like. Consider your lifestyle and the time and place of your wedding. If you’ve spent your life in jeans and T-shirts you will not be comfortable in a tricky, boned dress with a 20-layer petticoat on a hot day. Your dress should be a refl ection of you, not the other way around. You will be wearing the dress for much of the day. Comfort should be a primary concern.
When you’ve got a pile of photos, a good idea of the silhouette you want, and the budget for your dress, it’s time to go shopping.
To the Bridal Shop!
Plan on spending at least one day, possibly a couple more, in the effort. Dedicate two to three hours to spend at the bridal shop, or with a bridal couturier—usually a small fi rm with a good business built on word-ofmouth references. Th e warm, personal service in these places is unlike the treatment you’ve received in inexpensive chain stores, where the only store employee you encounter is a cashier. Th e salesperson will be in the dressing room with you to assist you in maneuvering into the dress and to help with the many buttons and hooks and eyes.
Show the salesperson the photos you’ve collected and have an honest discussion about your wedding plans, what you are looking for, and your budget.
The dresses you try might not be your size: they are samples intended to give you a range of possibilities. In a good shop your dress will ultimately be sized and hemmed to your body specifi cations. Trim and design details can be added or subtracted. Don’t be shy about asking for something that’s not on the dress; often it can be added to the dress—and to the price.
A wedding gown can cost as little as $500. Such a dress has little or no hand stitching and is usually made from a nice, quality polyester. At the other end of the spectrum gowns can cost $50,000 or more. Most brides spend from $500 to $4,000 on their wedding dresses. The upper level of that range off ers natural fabrics; a significant amount of hand stitching, embroidery, and detail work; and the cachet of a designer label.
Don’t want this season’s trendiest dress? You may also wish to look beyond what is offered in the stores. A couture salon experience enables you to order a dress that is ahead of the curve. Such an experience involves having a one-of-a-kind, custom designed dress created especially for you.
When your dress arrives, make an appointment to try it on as soon as possible. Take along the shoes you plan to wear on your wedding day. Once in the dress, make sure that the length is exactly as you want it and that you can walk and dance easily and gracefully in the dress. If it does not fit properly arrange for alterations.
Once the final alterations have been made, don’t go on a crash diet to lose a few more inches. (Talk about last minute chaos!) Wear it well and enjoy your special day.
Post-Wedding Dress Dos
What do you do with your dress after the wedding?
Hang your dress up after wearing it and ask a trusted member of the wedding party to spot clean obvious stains, such as a splatter of Bordeaux, before they have a chance to set permanently.
Have your dress carefully cleaned. You can simply put some polyester dresses in a washing machine and hang them to air-dry. If you know how to hand wash and iron silks—almost a lost art—you can wash a silk dress at home. If you dry clean your dress, avoid any off ers to seal the dress into a box. Th ere are many scams out there—in recent years brides have opened the boxes years after their
weddings to discover they are empty or that their dresses have been replaced with inferior ones. Instead, have the dress cleaned and then store it yourself on a padded hanger in a cloth bag—not a plastic bag. Place it in a closet with plenty of space, away from heat (a boiler on the other side of the wall, for instance) and light.
Not planning to store your dress? Here are some alternatives:
Donate it to a thrift shop run by the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries, a local hospital, or other charitable group. You’ll get good Karma for making the dress available to a grateful, budget-minded bride-to-be. Take it to a consignment shop. You will get a slight return on your investment— and delight a bride on a moderate budget.
Another recent trend is called Trash the Dress. It is a misnomer, as most dresses can be easily cleaned afterwards. In short, the bride (and often a very interested groom) has additional professional photos taken after the honeymoon. The bride poses in places where her dress might get dirty, rumpled, or wet—no-nos on her wedding day. Gone are the stiff , formal stances. Brides have rolled in the grass, sat in rusted old cars, walked into the ocean, gone bowling, or staged their own From Here to Eternity scenes with their eager hubbies—all while wearing the dress. Afterwards, most dresses are restored by simple hand washing or dry cleaning—then stored, consigned, or donated.
Under the Dress
What to wear under the dress can be a perplexing dilemma. Most grooms will assume that their brides are wearing some exotic cross between the undergarments of Scarlett O’Hara and those of a bordello madam. If you’re the bride, just smile and agree with him. When you change out of your wedding dress and into your “going away” outfi t, that’s the time to put on the fancy, ruffled, satin and silk stuff . (He’ll never know the diff erence.)
The undergarments you wear on your wedding day should be appropriate to the dress you wear over them. It makes no sense to strap yourself into a boned, laced-up corset if you are wearing a drapey, body-conscious, satin, 1930s Jean Harlow-inspired design. Just because your mom and grandmother girded and girdled themselves for their wedding days like knights going into battle, that doesn’t mean you have to.
Discuss your undergarment options with the salesperson in the wedding shop. When you purchase your dress look inside the sample. Or turn the dress inside out. If it has a built-in bra, push-up padding, or underwiring, then you probably don’t need a bra. Boning would make wearing a corset redundant. Does it have sewn-in petticoats or crinolines? If not, what kind of undergarment
does this dress need to help you look your best? Do you need a spandex-rich garment to slim your waistline, thighs, or hips—just a little—under a revealing dress? There are plenty of styles to choose from in lingerie.
Is the dress lined? Many top-of-the-line dresses are routinely lined in satin, taff eta, or crepe. If your dress is lined and does not need additional fullness, a slip or petticoat is just extra weight.
If you are wearing a dress that weighs 20 pounds or more, consider reducing what’s underneath. It’s going to be hot in that dress, even in winter weather. Many pantyhose styles, for instance, have builtin
panties that boast their lack of obvious panty lines. Some of those pantyhose panties have the same tummy-fl attening features off ered in control panties and long-line girdles. Try them out before
the wedding. Avoid multiple bulky layers of underwear.
Similarly, if the bra or corset is not built into the dress, take the dress with you when selecting a bra to wear with it. A good longline strapless bra can help you defy gravity, for example. There are bras designed specifically for halter-top styles and plunging backless dresses and others that have straps that can be hidden under the narrowest of tank tops.
One note here: it may be cool to wander around town with your multiple, colored, contrasting bra straps showing on a casual outing. Visible bra straps on women and baggy, droopy pants on guys
are generation Y’s way of irritating their baby boomer parents. Despite that, it is not cool to have bra straps showing during a wedding ceremony. And 20 years from now it will look even less cool in the old photos.
Th e bridal shop might have a selection of undergarments to show you. Or, if you are in a department store, the bridal salespeople can usually bring you bras and other undergarments to try on.
A good salesperson will be thrilled you asked for her advice.
Wendi Winters wore a strapless, ivory taff eta ball gown for her wedding on a Manhattan pier. The dress was a wedding gift from the fashion designer Akira Maki and was selected for her by Patty Hearst.
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